Archive of Henry Lydiate‘s Artlaw column, published in Art Monthly since 1976. Have a legal question about your career? Check our Directory or send us a legal query.
US Art Import Tariffs
President Trump triggered a global financial crisis in April 2025, when he issued Executive Order 14257 ‘Regulating Imports With a Reciprocal Tariff To Rectify Trade Practices That Contribute to Large and Persistent Annual United States Goods…
Copyrightability
Many governments worldwide are currently seeking to keep pace with the impact – on their economies, infrastructures and industries – of AI developments and innovations. In the visual art ecosystem, two challenging issues are being faced: whether AI generated…
Copyright and AI Consultation
The year is barely a month old and already 2025 is being variously described by digital technologists worldwide as: ‘A Year of AI Hype and Quiet Evolution’, ‘Maybe the Year of AI Legislation: Will We See…
Smarter Artists’ Funding
The UK’s Autumn Budget 2024 promulgated government’s fiscal policies and plans aimed at establishing economic foundations for its mission of ‘national renewal’ over the next five years. Many suggestions and proposals have been made in recent months…
On Freedom to Protest
On the morning of 14 October 2022 Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, 1888, was vandalised by two environmental protestors throwing the contents of two tomato soup cans over most of the painting exhibited in Room 43 at UK’s…
Brexit Bites
The UK’s art market is now feeling the effects of post Brexit laws that handicap domestic and international trading activities, chiefly involving physical shipping of artwork. In 2020 the EU was the second largest global art market behind…
War Sanctions
The Property of a Lady is a 1963 short story by Ian Fleming, in which 007 is tasked by M with rooting out a London based Soviet spymaster and his espionage activities to justify his expulsion from the…
Exhibition Relief Funding
Museums and Galleries Exhibition Tax Relief (MEGTR) came temporarily into UK law to give financial support for mounting and/or touring new public facing exhibitions in the five years from 1 April 2017 to 31 March 2022, after…
Brexit Begins
Post Brexit future relations between the UK and the EU are contained in a document signed on 24 December 2020: the EU UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). On 30 December 2020 UK Parliament ratified TCA by passing…
Wash-Out
A week is a long time in politics: rapid and unforeseeable changes can transform the political and economic landscape. During one week in April 2017, UK politicians made significant changes affecting the financial prospects of the UK’s public facing…
The Code of Art
The idea of art industry self regulation is accepted by an increasingly wide range of art market professionals and their expert advisers, but there is no agreement amongst them on best ways and means of successfully…
Art Industry Self-Regulation
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland during January 2015, leading world economist Nouriel Roubini publicly attacked the global art industry for being secretive and opaque, and called for its regulation. Roubini’s remarks were based on…
Should I Stay or Should I Go?
‘There are no votes in the arts. Nobody’s interested.’ This was the instinctive response of re election obsessed Jim Hacker when bridling at Sir Humphrey’s insistence that his PM should speak at a…
Regulating the Art Industry
Nouriel Roubini is a leading world economist, renowned for predicting the world economic downturn of 2007/8 years beforehand. At the World Economic Forum event at Davos in Switzerland in January 2015 he made a significant public…
Moral Rights: A Suitable Case for Treatment?
Artists’ moral rights laws have been in force in the UK since 1989. Have they been operating well for the past twenty odd years, or is there room for improvement? This question is…
Endangered Public Sculptures
Several currently running cases concern the legal status and protection of sculpture in the public environment. In November 2012 the London Borough of Tower Hamlets made a policy decision to sell Henry Moore’s sculpture, Draped Seated Woman,…
Change of Art
On 18 October 2011, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a programme, Change of Art, exploring ideas to ‘rotate or retire’ public artworks that have become ‘tired, decrepit or meaningless’, in the course of which legal and practical questions…
Deaccessioning Public Collections
During these straitened economic times increasing numbers of public museums and galleries around the world have been driven to consider deaccessioning works in their collections; and many have done so. There are clearly ethical and policy arguments…